Category: Poetry

The Sycamore grows branches for crows’ nests.
The harvest starts in April, and the hiding not
long after that. The Crepe Myrtle is starting to
blossom honey leaves.

Today I caught an Eastern Grey Squirrel foraging in my lilacs.
I’d like to think it was a stop to smell the roses moment, a
cultured creature admiring the lilac’s fleeting
life and intoxicating fragrance,

like the Star Jasmine I encounter on my walks. I bury my
face in its blossoms, and take a deep breath.

My dog smells the roots of the Sycamore, then makes his mark.

There. There’s another bird song I don’t know.

Yesterday, before breakfast, I decapitated a rat.

Rather, I should say, I cut its body from its head.

I guess it was a reverse decapitation.

You see, its head was stuck in a trap on one side of a fence,

and its body was dangling from my side.

I had a boyfriend who looked like a rat and a

rat named Poe, at the same time. He was a fry cook,

and maybe the rat was, too, in his last life.

I used to hold rats gently as a child, the same way I held this one,

when I wrapped its body in a plastic bag. Seeing the tail made me jump.

I walked around the block and told Robert he had a rat head in his trap,

explaining that I had to go all Aron Ralston on it with a pair of dull scissors.

I’m impressed, he said. I smiled and smoothed my hair back, feeling proud.

He asked, did you get a haircut? Yes, but I wanted an a-line.

I made slicing motions in the air to show how

I would have liked it cut.

Shells for ears, whisper deep water tales,
like the way Beetlejuice used to stick her beak in your ear,
click her tongue, waking up stem with I love your

oranges to be peeled, tiny star paw, hamster furry soul.
I will build a ladder for you. Climb out from the green rocks,
out from the cold, into the crook of my arm.

I’ll no longer linger at you from my red velvet throne, instead
you and I will leave Tetris behind, in a game of climb-the-stairs defection.
It’s either up to the hot attic, to the spineless books, or to

the smiling Chow Chow in the filthy yard, drinking cocoa from her cave.
Come, let us all run on campus, off-leash. I’ll put you in the crook of
a tree branch, then help you down again.

Where will you go when it’s all over, because
the stars in your galaxy are all askew?
Will you fly north, only to return to see
your rooftops removed?

There’s a ghost that rides its bike in the
tennis courts at night. I shine
my useless flashlight on it, and only
illuminate the wheels. I left my phone at home.
I am afraid.

These are times of stupor, as we sit up
in our painted trees and wonder if there
will be flowers in the spring.

There’s a ghost that rides its bike,
like a hummingbird with a compass. The
hummingbird is a compass, a warrior litmus,
rings around the planet.

Where will you go when you’re all over?
I walk the dog at night. My god she’s beautiful, a
face full of scars, eyes full of stars.
I am not afraid.

Give me a mountain again.
Soft trails for my tired feet and
a canopy of oak and redwood and eucalyptus.
Let my mind soften through the wind that is the
ocean in the trees, and let me keep up only
with myself.

The Joneses across the street gave birth to their third child. Assigned female at birth, they are waiting for her to identify. They call her Horse. On occasion, Horse escapes, goes door-to-door, and forages for food.

People have figured out that the fireworks are just that, and why are there so many people outside the gun store?

Dog adoptions are up, as are people complaining about dog poop on Nextdoor. Your puppy turned seven this year.

We all got fit, or fat. We won’t know until next year when the Peloton pays for itself, or it doesn’t. Gen Z continues to negotiate time off to surf.

The number of crows has now matched or exceeded the world population.

The cat still doesn’t care.

I wanted this to be beautiful for you.

In the photo I had of you, before I
gave away all my memories, your face is hidden,
arms outstretched to the right, sun on your olive skin.
Your dreadlocks fall around your downward gaze,
illuminated like light through the Catalpa.
And if I animate you in the time between
first light and dawn, your boyish smile and
sleepy brown eyes light up my morning,
even though you’re gone.

I missed you like you missed Reya, after Camilla took her away.
I watched your story like an endless election night, and
my longing never waned.
I watched you search, fly, drain accounts, dent couches.
I hoped you would hold your daughter again.

Hopes for 2021 Include

The bat, understood
Glass slaughterhouses
Soft ground for red geraniums
Using the term scarcity in a sentence
Fewer planes, the return of the songbird

I know nothing more than you were reunited, a decade later. The last words
I read were: “She’s ok. By bedtime last night she was cool,” you said.
You all returned to Norway. Camilla took up singing again.

Two years later, you died in your sleep. They call that a good death.
I found a selfie of you on Instagram, electrodes attached to
your hard, lean, body. Why did you shave your beautiful dreads?
I don’t know how you died, on account of no account.
I let the mystery be.

Did your heart break, or finally unbreak, leaving nothing left of longing?
Maybe you came here to do what
you needed to, to grace us with your beauty,
and show us the depths of a father’s love.

Hopes Now Include

Let love lead me
Let the mystery be

Pay no mind that I was a sensitive Cosmos flower and
didn’t want to leave home. But my mother and 6th grade teacher
made it happen, and I was bussed off to Hayfork to camp at
BAR 717 Camp Trinity, in the summer of 1978.

Nestled in the Nor Cal hills with a bunch of
other gangly pre-teens, I rode dotted horses,
spun bad pottery, and I remember something about Edelweiss.
Not the flower, but the song. You look happy to greet me.

My camp counselor was a tall woman angled like a bent coat hanger,
with stringy hair, and wide gold glasses.
Her next stop was probably a commune.
I slept next to her in the long camp barracks, she our only doorstop to
the woods behind the camp. The barracks had no doors on either end, and
at night I would peer into the woods just beyond the tree of her long body,
before sleep overtook me.

I was already wide-eyed and impressionable when a week into camp the
hard-bodied blonde with the tight blue shirt told me Sasquatch
came down from the hills at night. That was all he had to say.
He could have said the monster from Alien was not far behind, and
I would have believed him.

After the news of our future demise broke, my face
became the fullest moon at night, white enough to
light up the woods beyond “no-door,” my eyes black unblinking stars.
At every twig snap a frog tried to leap out of my heart.

Sasquatch never showed, and I was bussed home again.
I never told my mother, but to this day I still have
night terrors. Large hairy shadows cross my kitchen at night,
leaving rectangular footprints for me to clean.
And still I stare wide-eyed and unblinking through
open-screened windows, Bigfoot my Chupacabra to
everyone’s angels.